Re: Word Order in typology

Chris Bates scripsit:

> I suppose you could argue that subject does exist as a notion in some
> ergative languages, even though it isn't exhibited in the morphology.
> For example,
>
> He passed the man and stopped
>
> Would generally be interpreted as he stopped, not the man stopped, so
> the two verbs automatically share the same subject even though that
> subject is ergative in one and absolutive in another.
This property is called "syntactic accusativity", and some languages that
are morphologically ergative do show it.  But other morphologically
ergative languages are also syntactically ergative, and interpret the
above as meaning that the man stopped.

Chinese is neither syntactically accusative nor syntactically ergative,
interpreting such sentences as containing semantic ellipsis rather than
a syntactic gap, and filling the ellipsis with whatever makes sense:

	George dropped the watermelon and broke
	George dropped the watermelon and was embarrassed

are both legitimate and sensible sentences.

> I'm not arguing that GRs are useless... only that they are useless as a
> grounding for the study of language, because they are not language
> independent. :) It seems strange to me to base the study of language on
> terms which do not have the same properties for each object under
> study.
A: Given: a gas stove, a match, a kettle full of water.  Objective: boil the
   water.  What's the procedure?

B: Light the match, light the stove, put the kettle on the stove, wait.

A: Very good.  And if the match is already lit?

B (puzzled): The same, except without lighting the match.

A: Ah, that's what a physicist would do.  But a mathematician would
   blow out the match and stop, claiming that he had reduced the problem
   to the previous problem!

(What's wrong of course is that matches have state, which is not something
most mathematics is good at handling.)

> I am not arguing at all that we shouldn't study surface phenomena, but
> the study of surface phenomena must be grounded in the study of deep
> phenomena as much as possible. My main argument was that the universals
> regarding word order should be specifying that order using surface
> phenomina which aren't exhibited by all languages.
The difficulty is that surface phenomena are on the surface, available
to all, whereas deep phenomena (which is something of a contradiction
in terms: something that's "deep" precisely does not "appear") are
theory-laden and doubtful.

> Yes but these must be grounded in deeper structures.
I don't know whether this is a statement about linguistics or about
methodology.

> The condition talks of a surface realization which may not be exhibited
> in a given language, so the universal is not applicable to all
> languages, and thus flawed, since the whole point is to try to find
> phenoma true of all (or at least 99.9%) of languages.
Most actual language universals are conditional.

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